Oracle is on the march again — buying grid software company Tangasol. 

http://www.crn.com.au/story.aspx?CIID=76604&src=site-marq

Oracle may be coming to its senses about the grid space, and the importance of application performance and scalability.  Following up on its aquisition of Sleepycat last year, its interest in in-memory solutions continues.  This is more validation from a (very) large company that true innovators in the grid space are having a real impact on mainstream software providers.

I was also impressed with Nati Shalom’s analysis over on the GigaSpaces Blog, which (while understandably a bit one-sided) relates Oracle’s history in this area better than I could.

Once again — a big congratulations Cameron and company! 

Tags: acquisition, grid-computing, Oracle, sleepycat, tangosol

Oh, Robert.  I had hoped, since this blog is relatively lightly read, to escape this — but I’ve been tagged by the Five Things meme, and will not shirk.

Five Things You May Not Have Known About Me:

1. I am teaching my 15 1/2 year old daughter to drive.  Nothing at work is stressful anymore.
2. I worked three summers during college as a telephone solicitor.  I earned a year’s worth of “spending money” in two months each summer.  By the time I was 20, I was possibly the best telephone solicitor in the state of Utah.  I sold circus tickets, season tickets to a professional volleyball team, light bulbs, garbage bags, and I forget whatall else — sometimes for charity, sometimes not. 
3. I am known at Digipede as the guy who does NOT program, and I was never a professional software developer, but earlier in life I was definitely paid to program.  As a significant part of my job as an economist at PGE, I wrote FORTRAN for money.  I liked it, and I was good at it, but not great — fast, clever, but sloppy.  I learned to do other things.
4. I have an almost unbelievably poor sense of direction.  Despite carefully reading a simple subway map in New York this week, I got off two stops too early — and it was 15 degrees outside and blowing hard.  Today, I could not find Page Mill Road in Palo Alto — and I have been on Page Mill Road three million times in the past 21 years.  I have learned to work around this near-disability, but it’s damned inconvenient (and frequently amusing to passengers in my car). 
5. I can do this:

I will respectfully decline to pass this on; I think we now know five too many things about way too many bloggers.

Tags: Five-Things

Tags: ccs, Compute Cluster Server, Compute-Cluster, Digipede, HPC, Microsoft

I use a password manager and form-filler-outer called RoboForm.  It is by far the best solution I’ve found to creating and remembering multiple non-trivial passwords.  (Like much of the reliable technology I use, this was recommended to me by Robert Anderson, who is almost as good at finding technology that works as he is at building it.)  RoboForm is simple to learn, works flawlessly, and is published by people at Siber Systems who clearly care passionately about quality, customer service, and security.  I have two licenses — one for my laptop (my “work computer”) and one for my home desktop.

As my patient readers know, my home desktop recently melted down (see other recent posts), and was replaced by a new one.  Like other software, RoboForm licenses need to be “activated,” and I’ve used up my license activations.  I verified this by trying to activate a license on my new machine — nothing doing.  So I went to the RoboForm support page, explained the issue in plain English, and got a response from a human by email within 40 minutes saying “we’ve added another activation, it should work now.”  And it did.

I did not have to “prove” that my computer had died, I did not need to wait on hold, I just told them my problem and they solved it.

Go and buy their software now.  You  will be very glad you did.